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TazeTSchnitzel 4 days ago [-]
After habitually consuming caffeine (not in coffee form) daily, usually multiple times a day, for more than a decade, a horrible mental health incident happened to me that forced me to stop it for a while. Afterwards I didn't resume the habit, and so I no longer have a tolerance.
This has let me evaluate what caffeine does with fresh eyes, so to say, because I can now consume it occasionally while having many non-caffeinated days to compare to. It's a profoundly psychoactive substance and does a lot of things to cognition. I guess I have decided I don't enjoy how it feels, having previously been dependent on it.
bayarearefugee 4 days ago [-]
Quitting caffeine after decades of use was a bit of a mixed bag for me in the short term, but positive in the long term.
Going caffeine-free made it much easier to lose weight as I have far less cravings for high carbs and sugar now, presumably this is related to the impulsivity impact talked about in the paper.
Going caffeine-free also made me very depressed for a while with severe anhedonia, this lasted way longer (like 3-4 months) than one would generally expect for caffeine withdrawal symptoms.
I had seemingly become so used to the increased dopamine signaling while buzzed on caffeine that my brain was a mess for a rather extended period of time as it got used to not having it.
Overall I view quitting as a positive for me, but I'd warn anyone thinking about doing it to do it carefully and closely monitor their mental health. AFAIK the impacts of quitting can be quite different for different people, so my experience may differ than that of others, but I had no idea how much of a (temporary) mental health crash quitting caffeine could cause until I experienced it.
gabriel-uribe 4 days ago [-]
I'm almost exactly 1 year coffee-free (not caffeine free, but significantly less because tea is much less addictive for me).
Also positive in the long-term for me. Fewer digestive issues, less spiky dopamine sensitive or impulsiveness and performance during the day, better memory. I wish it weren't so.
But damn was the 3-6 months of anhedonia awful. I still feel pangs of it.
PsylentKnight 4 days ago [-]
How much coffee were you drinking before quitting? 3-6 months seems like a very long time. As far as I know, most withdrawal symptoms should end within 2 weeks, with the most intense symptoms ending within a few days
gabriel-uribe 2 days ago [-]
3-4 cups a day. Was deeply stressed building products with <$100/mo in rev. Couldn't sleep at night from all the caffeine and cortisol spikes.
The ensuing several months were some of the worst in my life (many confounding variables) missing coffee, feeling anhedonic, and inadequately caffeinated/lucid to tackle my problems.
Noaidi 4 days ago [-]
You may have naturally low dopamine production or release (or low ATP or GTP). Everyone will react differently because genetics so you are right, everyone needs to be mindful of their reaction.
You might want to look at this pathway, and the enzymes, and the cofactors for these enzymes:
> Going caffeine-free made it much easier to lose weight as I have far less cravings
That's surprising to me. In my case one of the reasons I discontinued it (emotional effects aside) was mild but consistent weight loss. The stimulant part of the effect seems to suppress my appetite quite effectively although at least part of that is likely indirect due to sustained task focus leading me to skip meals.
bayarearefugee 4 days ago [-]
> That's surprising to me.
I think this is one of those YMMV things with caffeine.
It is an appetite suppressant in general but for me it seems to cause a significant rebound effect.
On caffeine I would eat less early in the day (when I was most using caffeine) but then I would get severe cravings for carbs/sugar later at night.
Without the caffeine everything is nice and evened out and I feel way more in control of my eating habits without really trying.
sph 3 days ago [-]
A lot of people and research focus on coffee suppressing appetite, which is downstream to the cortisol-raising effects of fight-and-flight response which raise blood sugar among a myriad other things. What they forget is that elevated blood sugar and cortisol eventually results in lower blood sugar than baseline — which is when the hunger strikes.
So yes, coffee is an appetite suppressant, but 6-8 hours later your appetite rebounds. Many people don't feel this effect simply because they have frequent-enough meals and/or coffees to stay ahead of the blood sugar crash. If you get into intermittent fasting, it's pretty easy to notice. In my quest to fix my metabolism, I am constantly aware that my morning cup of coffee is the biggest reasons why I get ravenous around 5pm.
Lalabadie 4 days ago [-]
You're not alone, caffeine is a known appetite suppressant.
randusername 4 days ago [-]
I experienced a similar anhedonia when quitting caffeine. I don't think the caffeine itself was the problem, I think it was just helping a lot more than I knew with the inertia of circling the pit without tottering in.
Turns out I needed stimulants from time to time, just not that one.
pdimitar 4 days ago [-]
What stimulants have you landed on? And do you feel they're better for you?
I'm pondering getting a coffee machine at home. 400 EUR is not a sizable investment and one I'd have forgotten about it 3 months but I'm getting cold feet when it gets to committing.
Americano coffee definitely picks me up and is a full net positive for me. But that's only if I drink 2-3 times a week. Not sure how it's going to be if I start getting it every day.
randusername 4 days ago [-]
Working with a psychiatrist, I take half the minimum therapeutic dose of generic Adderall as-needed.
Caffeine makes me feel like I'm overclocked, but Adderall lets me run tasks async. The latter is so much more preferable for dealing with the demands of life.
Medicate at 4pm, then I know I can effortlessly interleave chores, family time, social obligations, and my own creative pursuits. Otherwise I'd spend my evenings on the couch stuck trying to offload unsolved problems of the workday.
Vigorous exercise accomplishes the same thing, but I can't always make that happen "as-needed".
pdimitar 4 days ago [-]
That's pretty interesting, thank you. To me Adderall is a bridge too far though. I don't want to truly medicate (though I guess we can always argue semantics i.e. is getting coffee everyday not like medication?).
I just need something like the Americano every now and then really.
I agree on vigorous exercise completely. My last two jobs have been (well, the current one still is) hugely demanding and that led to me dropping a lot of exercise. Still trying to understand why and to undo that because I gained back 5kg (sigh).
Tried Earl Grey too. It's actually awesome but I must be careful; easy to go above a certain dose that just tires me and makes me crash.
One thing I'll try before considering the coffee machine really seriously: theacrine pills. I'll give them 2-3 weeks and will make a decision.
sph 3 days ago [-]
I used to be prescribed lisdexamfetamine for ADHD and after 3 years it did feel "a bridge too far for me" as well.
My stimulant of choice now is low-dose nicotine patches which I feel is extremely underrated, and demonised because of the effects of smoking and vaping. Mind you: I am an ex-smoker and I am quite aware of how strong the addiction can be, yet pure nicotine is the most mellow stimulant there is.
It's been 2 years now since I replaced my ADHD medication with nicotine and I haven't felt the need to increase the dosage. It's cheaper, lasts MUCH longer, doesn't cause anxiety and it doesn't push you around like amphetamine.
YMMV.
nchmy 4 days ago [-]
Get yourself a moka pot, aeropress or French press. Fantastic coffee for very cheap.
Highly unlikely that 2-3 times a week will last though - either religiously stick to once a week or be open to drinking it daily.
pdimitar 4 days ago [-]
I have a moka pot but I guess I am doing it wrong -- maybe I should not fill its coffee compartment to the brim? is there other way of doing it? -- because the coffee that gets out destroys me: heart palpitations, slight arrhythmia, headaches, and energy crash. I can't drink too much caffeine but light doses (i.e. the Americano) actually help me and energize me. It's really weird.
What's good about the aero-press and the French press btw? I am only just trying to understand the landscape.
nchmy 4 days ago [-]
Look up Moka Pot Voodoo on YouTube. It'll sort you out.
Americano means nothing - its just diluted strong coffee (eg espresso, moka pot). You probably need to learn how much actual coffee your body can handle.
I handle very little, so have a 1 cup moka pot which takes 9-10g of ground coffee. And that's pushing my upper limit. My body can usually handle better a very unsatisfying 6-7g brewed. I need to find some good decaf... (though I have a line on Laurina coffee, which has half as much caffeine. Hopefully I can get some soon).
French press is just a really easy way to get a great cup of coffee. You don't even need one - you could just make cowboy coffee (grounds in hot water) and carefully decant it out at after 5-10 min. Look up James Hoffman french press method. His aeropress series is good too.
You also need to learn that all of this stuff that everyone says is just drug addict self-talk coping. You only actually get a boost at first, and then your body adapts and is in caffeine deficit and is just trying to get back to baseline with more coffee.
The healthiest way to do any of this would be to try as you said (but likely unsuccessfully) to limit your coffee intake to 2-3 days a week, so that you might actually get a kick rather than just sustain your addiction. Once a week as a special occasion might be more successful. It should be treated as a healthy person treats alcohol...
I'm not even joking with all this drug addict talk.
ValentineC 4 days ago [-]
> I have a moka pot but I guess I am doing it wrong -- maybe I should not fill its coffee compartment to the brim?
How big is your moka pot? A "4 cup" Bialetti takes around 16-18g of coffee, which isn't a lot.
No matter how dilute your end product is, the amount of caffeine consumed will roughly be about the same. But I guess diluting it means you take longer to consume all that caffeine.
nchmy 3 days ago [-]
That doesn't make sense, as my 1 cup takes 10g and 3 cup takes 30g.
ValentineC 3 days ago [-]
Is yours a Bialetti? Mine's the "4 cup" stainless steel Venus, so I think it's probably like a "3 cup" Moka Express:
Yes bialetti original. Sounds like the venus is the difference.
Ps Check out moka pot voodoo on YouTube, if you haven't already. I almost never make a bad brew now (except for literally just now, but was with a new bean, roasted darker than usual. Will grind finer next time).
ValentineC 4 days ago [-]
I second either a moka pot or an AeroPress.
The moka pot would be better if you have easy access to cooking facilities (the stainless versions are also easier to clean, and work on induction).
The AeroPress would be better if you only have access to hot water.
pdimitar 4 days ago [-]
As written above, coffee from moka pot absolutely destroys me. :(
It's too concentrated.
freshchilled 4 days ago [-]
Moka pot coffee is definitely strong. If that's your only coffee maker, I'd just dilute that with more hot water.
An Aeropress is less concentrated in my experience, and it's pretty easy to use. I prefer iced coffee unless it's cold out, so I fill the collector with ice before I brew. The melted water dilutes it nicely, in my opinion.
benhurmarcel 4 days ago [-]
Especially if you like Americanos, chances are you'll be happier with filter coffee from good beans, rather than spending it in an espresso machine.
Get an Aeropress, or Hario Switch, or Clever dripper. A kettle and some filters. For beans buy from roasters that do light/meduim roasts, and print a recent roasting date on the package/website. The only expensive item should be a grinder, look at 1zpresso Q/Air/X or Kingrinder K6 if you want to limit price.
pdimitar 4 days ago [-]
Not gonna lie, this sounds like way too much work.
What I am mostly looking for is some sort of an easy access to a diluted coffee like the Americano, really. I am OK with buying 1-2kg of beans because I am fairly sure that's going to last me 3-6 months. Cleaning the machine I've done in offices -- 3 minute job.
But any more commitment just sounds tiring. I am not a coffee connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. But light caffeine doses absolutely do help me in very measurable ways. I need easy access to that.
Buying a coffee machine is not a big commitment obviously, I am just afraid I'll deem the experiment unsuccessful in a month and then I'll have a nice machine lying around doing nothing that I can't easily sell.
This style, pour over machine that grinds itself, but uses all water you put in, so it's not fully automatic.
It's automatic enough, but also very cheap. Maybe even ⅒ of a price of a fancy espresso machine. And you can add "too much" water (than the setting you set) to make lighter coffee.
dgacmu 3 days ago [-]
I finally gave in and got a breville bambino plus and I have no regrets. It was $400 on sale, produces quite decent espresso, foams milk well, has been very reliable, and doesn't heat up the kitchen - I held off getting an espresso machine for years because the instant heat ones always seemed to suck. This one doesn't. I mostly drink Americanos and straight espressos, my wife drinks lattes, everybody is happy.
But I have to agree with others: for my diluted espresso desires, I used (and still have) an Aeropress for years and it's simply fantastic. Low cost, almost zero maintenance, good results. Very similar output to an americano though lower on crema.
pdimitar 3 days ago [-]
Nice. Does it have a special option for Americano?
That's the main reason I'm leaning towards Delonghi Magnifica Start. It has a button for Americano. I tried moka pot coffee + diluting it with hot water. It's not the same. :(
dgacmu 2 days ago [-]
No, I just pre-fill a cup with hot water from the steam wand (it has a hot water mode) and then pull a double shot of espresso into it.
(That's technically an Australian long black but I like it better - it leaves the crema on top.)
ses1984 4 days ago [-]
You can get an over-the-cup pour over for ~$10-20, basic blade grinder for the same, and a pack of filters. That’s all you really need.
ValentineC 4 days ago [-]
A cheap proper coffee hand grinder like a Timemore C2 would go so much further than a blade grinder that would shred the coffee beans up inconsistently.
(Buy used for even better value. Hand grinders last forever.)
michaelhoney 4 days ago [-]
If you are keen for a machine and you like it diluted, I recommend the Moccamaster. It’s a good-looking classic machine that you could definitely sell.
For a similar coffee with more manual work, get a Chemex
benhurmarcel 4 days ago [-]
In that case, if you stick to pre-ground coffee, just get an Oxo Rapid Brewer. It’s cheap, easy and fast to use and clean, and only requires a kettle. You’ll get decent coffee.
mosselman 4 days ago [-]
I would like to second this solid advice.
I have a very nice grinder: a solis caffissima digital coffee grinder. It is available under a different brand name in the US I think.
I make filter coffee with a very basic earthenware filter holder with melitta high quality yet very normal filters and sometimes I mix it up with an aeropress which offers a different type of taste because of the low acidity way of making coffee. I just drip the coffee into a nice thermos so I can make 4 cups in one go and just pour from the thermos.
My coffee is much nicer than I get in most places, both professional and at homes and it doesn’t cost me a lot in effort, money and, very importantly, workspace footprint.
Espresso machines require a lot of space and maintenance and trouble to make.
Having said all this, I am quite intrigued about all the stories about the negative effects of coffee. I just thought it was about influencing sleep, but I had never thought about the memory and mood effects. I will study this some more in the coming months.
Uptrenda 3 days ago [-]
I think this monthly withdrawal syndrome with the anhedonia reflects a true gap in scientific understanding of caffeine. There are communities where people routinely quit caffeine (e.g. /r/decaf) who all notice the same thing. Yet if you look at how long caffeine withdrawal lasts: the reference answer is 1 - 2 weeks (then everything is "normal.")
I think caffeine is legitimately more disruptive and addictive than is commonly acknowledged. It creates quite a life-style loop where you need it for [drive, energy, mood, alertness] as a fix to many of the issues it causes, lol. Caffeine is such a widely used drug yet doesn't seem to have been studied that much. It's fascinating to me how the drugs that are socially acceptable seem completely arbitrary. Like alcohol (which in terms of addictiveness isn't far behind the most addictive drugs.)
In tables that compare the most addictive drugs, you know what drug is always missing yet seems to be consumed more widely than any other recreational drug on the planet: caffeine. This is funny though. It may be difficult to actually do high quality, comparative research on caffeine because to do so you would need to find people who don't already consume caffeine and I suspect that is a harder problem than it sounds.
By the way: the set of people who have never been effected by caffeine shrinks even further if you consider whether the mother consumed it during pregnancy.
BatteryMountain 4 days ago [-]
I've had the same experience. Caffeine is super addicting, the ritual & habits surrounding it is a potent pull. For myself, it makes me erratic, impulsive, more reactive and agitated. One cup a day puts me on edge, makes me sweat more, makes me more intolerant, makes everything feel too slow. It such a sneaky drug and it can really get under your skin without you realizing how much it changes you.
orphea 4 days ago [-]
I don't have the same experience, and I drink one cup of coffee (270 ml) almost every day. No agitation, no impulsiveness. I can drink coffee in late evening (let's say 8 pm) and sleep well. I guess I'm trying to say that we should not project our own experience on others, everyone is different.
CuriousRose 4 days ago [-]
In my experience, this is common among people with ADHD (myself, friends with ADHD, family with ADHD, psychologist’s patients anecdotal evidence). YMMV
BatteryMountain 4 days ago [-]
I have adhd too, but cannot use stimulant medications (they are too strong). I've had to use non-stim meds.
What if long term caffeine use causes some of the adhd symptoms? It interesting to ponder because if I stop using caffeine for a month, some of my adhd symtoms go away completely. I've done stints of complete caffeine breaks, content consumption breaks (one week or more without screens) and I felt amazing and alive. The first couple of days of using caffeine feels amazing but then I feel dead inside again and live like a robot. So in my mind, caffeine is my main target when I try to adjust my routine/behaviours.
sph 3 days ago [-]
It's not, really. Coffee is an anxiety and insomnia machine for me, while nothing made me as calm as amphetamine (even my heart rate was lower).
I do have a professional diagnosis for ADHD.
orphea 4 days ago [-]
Hmm, this is an interesting observation. I do have signs of ADHD.
Sammi 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nsagent 4 days ago [-]
I really only started drinking coffee at my first real job after grad school. They had free coffee in the kitchen, so I'd occassionally have one. Maybe once or twice a week. I was like that for several years, and would occassionally go weeks without a coffee. During that time, I was very productive and went from being a new grad to leading the entire team of veterans in less than five years.
After leaving that job, I now consume fairly regularly (for the past decade at least). I can still easily skip days without coffee, though I do prefer having it daily. I literally see no difference in my day to day between having coffee and not throughout my two decades of experience with coffee. I can just as easily fall asleep after a coffee and I rarely feel amped up from a coffee (if I do, then I just stop drinking it). I've certainly never felt anhedonia like many others have mentioned in the comments when I've taken breaks from coffee.
I think it's clear that people have different experiences with substances. Whether mine is a common one or not, I cannot say. But I do have a baseline to compare to and I can legitimately say the only thing that has ever caused me anhedonia was burning out from too much work (during burn out I was still consuming coffee and it didn't improve my mental state at all).
aswegs8 4 days ago [-]
My prior would rather be that people have wildly varying sensitivity to caffeine genetically. Some get panic attacks, some don't feel much.
IAmBroom 4 days ago [-]
Only true if they drank a cup of coffee since their earliest memories began.
blopp99 4 days ago [-]
I had a similiar case with influeza the past december. I didn't eat for 4 days, fever for a long time, and low energy during the whole 4 weeks it took me to get back to normal.
I couldn't drink coffee or alcohol during those 4 weeks, and notice that I didn't get any migraines after those 4 weeks even when I, for the past 12 years, knew exactly how I got them reliably.
I didn't make sense to me to keep drinking coffee because the benefits of coffee which for me was mostly ritual and taste, didn't outweight the weight of having a migraine for sure if I slept a minute less than 8hrs.
Mind you, I'm talking about a cup almost everyday with milk, ice coffee in the mornings.
bichiliad 4 days ago [-]
I had wild food poisoning and had a similar experience (took me out for weeks, didn’t drink coffee). I assume the body must have some sort of gating mechanism for pain; I have absolutely had caffeine withdrawal before, but not that time. I’ve since cut back and switched to tea, which I believe has helped with my anxiety.
addaon 4 days ago [-]
I’m in the same spot after 4-5 weeks of norovirus. Couldn’t touch the stuff. Before, was at probably three to five cups a day. Biggest difference was waking up and feeling awake instead of in need of coffee… but I do miss it, too. Trying to decide what the new steady state is going to be. I’ve been doing one cup a day then switching to decaf while traveling, but that’s harder at home.
yetihehe 4 days ago [-]
After habitually consuming coffee daily in large quantities for two decades, I had mental health incident, during which I drank twice the amount of coffee and it felt like water. After that incident I still drink previous amount of coffee, but feel much better, much more rested, on an upward trajectory and like I have finally managed to escape the swamp I dragged myself into over many years.
After reevaluating your comment and my experience I declare that coffee is not always a cause of mental health incidents, sometimes it might help people.
kakacik 4 days ago [-]
I do believe a lot of it boils down to tolerance. I for example feel basically 0 effects, and drink it just because I like the taste (of a good one with milk, or exceptionally some good espresso / ristretto after big dinner).
I recently traveled and didn't have coffee for more than a week. No change I could feel, no craving, nothing. But one of my ex-gf was quite sensitive on many things, had frequent headaches, low blood pressure and coffee was helping with those visibly. So YMMV.
readthenotes1 4 days ago [-]
Notably, the article is looking at coffee, both caffeinated and decaffeinated. There is a lot more to coffee than just caffeine...
mixedCase 4 days ago [-]
The overwhelming majority of the enjoyable coffee experiences are caffeinated. While there is good decaf out there it's not the norm, specially in smaller markets.
tsimionescu 4 days ago [-]
I think they meant that coffee contains a lot of other compounds than just caffeine, which something like energy drinks or teas will not include. So you can't necessarily extend conclusions from a study on consumption of coffee to effects that other drinks that happen to include caffeine might have.
Edit: this is especially relevant here, as the study found similar effects in decaffeinated coffee drinkers. So the effects they observed, if real, are not related to caffeine.
grvdrm 4 days ago [-]
Can you speak more to the psychoactive and cognition impacts to you in specifics?
Very interested.
I am a regular coffee drinker, mostly limited to very early morning (e.g. 5-7 am). Also consume celsius here and there when I want to minimize stomach disruption in the morning (e.g. I am about to run).
But have also used THC in the past (no longer, major anxiety inducer for me). Alcohol like so many people. And more recently went on an assisted MDMA/ketamine therapy journey that continues to amaze me in its impact (in all good ways).
Asking as I am reducing caffeine slowly right now and curious what folks are seeing as differences on/off in real terms.
Lalabadie 4 days ago [-]
I've been a decaf drinker for close to a decade now, maybe my experience is interesting to you:
I have better mood, presence of mind and working memory in the morning, especially compared to caffeinated peers. I'm also a lot more aware of when I've woken up from a bad night's sleep (see paragraph 5).
I have much less mid-day dysregulation/impulses compared to caffeinated peers. No predictable afternoon slump either – but a rich lunch will always leave me foggy, lol. If it's the weekend, I'll often join my young kid for the afternoon nap and fall asleep in minutes – the 30-45 min nap usually feels amazing.
Coffee really feels to me now like the psychoactive substance it is. I've had anxiety issues for other reasons in recent years, and today a cup of caffeinated coffee will often trigger a good level of anxiety if I'm not physically active during the peak. The physical symptoms of both are very similar. If I'm moving about, it usually feels good, like something hyped me up, but the sensation comes on its own instead.
Anxiety greatly changes my sleep needs, and caffeine and alcohol both hid these sensations in the past, enough that I suspect I didn't have the interoception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception) to consciously notice and adjust in the past, which would leave me stuck or spiraling in terms of maintenance/recovery, probably for weeks at a time.
In recent days (pretty low anxiety! knock on wood) I have sleep that's almost 2hrs shorter per night, waking up naturally. That came very progressively (sleep quality), then very suddenly (lower needs). Also a great gain, though I also aged a decade and that must contribute as well.
Note that I faded out caffeine by progressively substituting for decaf. No headaches this way (from a peak of ~4 cups a day, I would say?). It sounds like you're doing the same, which I really recommend! There's no need to self-flagellate on top of what's usually a major habit adjustment.
fellowniusmonk 4 days ago [-]
I take a 30 min bike ride midday, not a hard ride, just get on the bike and start peddling, I'll now do a leisurely 6-8 mi.
My cognition in my 40s is now better than it was at 26, at 37 before I started this routine I thought my engineering career was over, the post lunch crash, the mental tiredness, just terrible.
The fact that we build our brain work spaces so distant from physical movement is bad for our mental health, our soles, our souls, and doing untold economic damage to our country (the u.s. in my case.), I tried lunch walks for years and it's just too fucking boring, cycling is great, after work I rollerblade and it's so mentally engaging and distinct it obliterates the after work fog.
canes123456 4 days ago [-]
The psychoactive effects of caffeine are massive after you detox for a few weeks. I had a full cup after not having caffeine for a month and the effect was massive. Near euphoria, constant task switching, some anxiety, etc. I personally felt the effect was much stronger than weed has ever felt for me and comparable to having 5+ drinks of alcohol.
But the effect quickly drops to almost nothing very rapidly. I started having caffeine 3 out of 7 days because having a low caffeine tolerance was too annoying. One coke, tea, chocolate would completely destroy my sleep.
wafflemaker 4 days ago [-]
I had heart/chest pains from Lisdextroamphetamine (ADHD meds) that went away when I stopped drinking coffee. And I drunk very little, just one half cup in the morning.
Much less anxious now too, but that's more likely due to ADHD meds.
scns 4 days ago [-]
Even on the "milder" Methylphenidate you can experince clenching jaw, grinding teeth and a chafed tongue when consuming coffee, tea and even dark chocolate.
barrenko 4 days ago [-]
Coffee is a plant demon that created the western civilization as we know it today...
fermiNitambh 4 days ago [-]
I like this worldview. Prior to coffee, Europe was in the grip of the beer dwarves. Coffee demons took over and invented nationalism, capitalism and Keynesian economics.
malicka 4 days ago [-]
Putting Keynesian economics next to nationalism on the evil list was so funny, I almost spit out my coffee.
sph 3 days ago [-]
Is it? Keynesian economics created the economic framework to finance World Wars.
nervousvarun 4 days ago [-]
Obligatory recommendation for: Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World by Mark Pendergrast
Fantastic book. I first encountered it...in a coffee shop :) Read a chapter and immediately bought the book for myself.
anonym29 4 days ago [-]
At least the coffee demons aren't quite as bad as the amphetamine demons that produced Nazi Germany.
barrenko 4 days ago [-]
We could view as amphetamine vs. coffee / black tea.
4 days ago [-]
1234letshaveatw 4 days ago [-]
colonizer fuel
Noaidi 4 days ago [-]
Yes, same here. I have schizoaffective disorder and realizing that caffeine affected my mental health so drastically was the beginning of my recovery journey 30 years ago. I can use caffeine now as a drug when I need it. Same with alcohol.
apples_oranges 4 days ago [-]
Agree, I drink it a lot and then stop drinking it at least once a year for a few weeks, and for sure it's a different mode of mind, but can't really qualify it besides that I remember my thinking being softer, calmer and perhaps even "more correct" without coffee.
(But I never had any mental-health incidents, and I drink a lot of it, more than all people that I personally know.)
yetihehe 4 days ago [-]
For many years I go to the same vacation spot (kayaking in the most beautiful nature place I have seen) and go cold-turkey. I didn't notice any side effects of lack of coffee besides slower muddier thinking. After I go back and start drinking coffee, feel back to normal.
I also had a very big life altering mental health incident very recently, drank A LOT of coffee during and I feel it helped, now I am much more calm, "more correct" despite drinking coffee like before.
Based on this I posit that coffee is used by humans to offset unwanted mentality changes, not a cause of unwanted mentality changes.
nervousvarun 4 days ago [-]
Consider yourself lucky...You are one of these mythical creatures who don't get migraines from caffeine withdrawal. My wife is the same.
When I quit I get splitting headaches that are way more severe than a typical tension headache. Completely debilitating without medication. Get them for a week or so (also get the muddier thinking but I could live with that).
iberator 3 days ago [-]
caffeine is not the same as coffee.
coffee is caffeine plus THOUSANDS of compounds interacting with each other and your body: some of them are protective for the heart for example.
That's why synthetic caffeine is bad, while coffee is overall good in moderation.
That's why more people die from energy drinks than from coffe in coffeeshop hehe
amelius 4 days ago [-]
This happened to me with Pepsi cola.
But then I found out I can drink coffee just fine, even 5 cups per day.
Now I'm thinking it was the artificial sweetener.
testing22321 4 days ago [-]
Same. I didn’t realize I’d been living life through a fog until fully 12 months with zero caffeine
jayd16 4 days ago [-]
The occasional cup where you can actively feel you don't like it, doesn't sound like a solid analogue to the steady state of daily consumption.
I jog every day and enjoy vs I don't exercise but I occasionally sprint and I feel awful after.
IAmBroom 4 days ago [-]
GP said they previously had daily consumption.
jayd16 4 days ago [-]
And they didn't come to the same conclusion then. They changed their behavior, don't like the new behavior and are extrapolating that beyond the new behavior.
m463 4 days ago [-]
true coffee lovers drink decaf. (they can drink coffee often without or with fewer side effects)
rimliu 4 days ago [-]
How do you know that caffeine was the cause?
ivan_gammel 4 days ago [-]
This of course cannot be generalized, but withdrawal is quite noticeable for personal well-being in a positive way.
TazeTSchnitzel 4 days ago [-]
I didn't say it was the cause of the mental health incident! And I don't believe it to have been "the cause", either. It just happens to have been the thing that caused me to abruptly stop.
It likely was a contributor, insofar as the incident had poor sleep as a contributing factor, and I do know with some certainty the caffeine habit had been causing some (likely not all) of my sleep problems. I can also tell you the very worst day of that incident was when I mistakenly consumed caffeine again prior to being recovered enough for that to be safe; that was a horrible glimpse at what that drug can do to you when you're in an already very unstable state. Caffeine definitely can aggravate all kinds of symptoms, even when you're in a relatively stable state. It's a stimulant, after all.
But I think caffeine consumption is… only one factor of many in causes of that incident, and doesn't deserve any special blame. The relevance of the mental health incident here is really that it gave me a chance and a good reason to abruptly stop, and therefore also the opportunity to see what getting the brain back into the caffeination ritual again feels like. (I've tried taking it for a few consecutive days more than once since then, and not particularly enjoyed it. I've also tried it on single isolated days.)
testemailfordg2 4 days ago [-]
Funded by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) — an industry body — which is a notable conflict of interest the authors disclose but don't extensively discuss
rapidaneurism 4 days ago [-]
It does not sound like an outcome that big coffee paid for it to be so:
The first paragraph of the introduction touts all the health benefits of coffee.
I don't necessarily deny these benefits but it feels weird for a scientific paper to hedge its bets like this.
> Moderate coffee consumption is associated with various health benefits, including reduced risks of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer3. In a large cross-sectional study of 468,629 individuals without clinical cardiovascular disease, light-to-moderate coffee consumption was linked to lower rates of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke incidence4. Furthermore, coffee intake is consistently associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in a dose-dependent manner, across multiple human cohorts5,6,7. Meta-analyses have also found that coffee consumers face a lower risk of depression8,9, and one meta-analysis of cohort studies examining cognitive decline, showed that coffee consumption accounted for a 27% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease
It's like they're starting off with "Now don't get me wrong. Coffee will cure cancer, but..."
culi 3 days ago [-]
Yeah it's telling how ISIC is covering this study. Their title is:
> New research reveals mechanisms behind coffee’s positive effects on the gut-brain axis
> It does not sound like an outcome that big coffee paid for it to be so:
Who said anything about big coffee? These guys might be a secret, anti-coffee organisation. /s
fedeb95 4 days ago [-]
it's the barley cartel.
IAmBroom 4 days ago [-]
I knew it! Microchips in my beer. That's why I only drink it from aluminum cans, to foil the transmissions.
fc417fc802 4 days ago [-]
Ah yes, yet another in the long line of results which confirm our suspicion of water being wet to have been right all along. In this case it's something that anyone who has spent a significant amount of time around routine coffee drinkers and regularly consumed it themselves already took for granted.
iammjm 4 days ago [-]
Do they though? Any data on that? Also, the highly caffeinated people might also be sleep deprived, which impacts memory and emotional regulation
Antibabelic 4 days ago [-]
The data is in the linked paper. It's a direct quote from the abstract.
4 days ago [-]
oharapj 4 days ago [-]
Please delete this comment. It’s embarrassing
baxtr 4 days ago [-]
Maybe he forgot?
carabiner 4 days ago [-]
Every damn time, for chocolate, coffee, and red wine "studies."
46493168 4 days ago [-]
Who else would fund a study?
culi 3 days ago [-]
It'd be nice if the gov't could do it. Or at least enforced some regulation so that a study is forced to preprint so we at least know when a study was attempted but didn't end up publishing the results
Ultimately these industry-funded studies are still gov't funded as well. They are "public-private partnerships" but it's stupid how we don't talk about the fact that usually the majority of the grants come from the gov't. Even when a study is mostly funded by the industry it's relying on utilize existing infrastructure or early-stage research initiated by government funds.
LogicFailsMe 4 days ago [-]
I once quit caffeine cold for 6 months: 2 weeks of pure hell then it was like I never craved it until life got real and stressful and I fell off the wagon. Today, I drink my espresso with a dot of lowfat milk now and life is currently too real and stressful to consider trying to drop it again. I do suspect some of us likely have undiagnosed low-level mood disorders leaving us highly functional but discontent and caffeine is the spackling compound used to plug the hole in our souls.
BoneShard 4 days ago [-]
I stopped drinking coffee for a month and didn't notice any difference in my anxiety/mood/etc, so I returned to my regular schedule (3-4 large cups in the mornings).
inerte 4 days ago [-]
Same here, and it made me wonder, why did I go back to drinking coffee?
My best explanation is that there are effects, I just suck at self-awareness :)
BoneShard 4 days ago [-]
Well, because I like it, and I like my morning rituals.
mjrpes 4 days ago [-]
I quit caffeine for a year but it didn't work out for me. I felt mentally sluggish all the time; there would be times I'd be staring at my screen with my mind resisting the act of processing any information. I also noticed I became very sensitive with how much sleep I got, and if it was anything less than 8 hours the day would be miserable. I could be a special case here with altered brain development since even as a small child I was drinking liters of black sun tea. So since my withdrawal experiment I've highly regulated my caffeine intake with pills with a maximum of 200mg a day before noon, although I will sometimes cut back to 50-100mg a day during periods when my life isn't running full steam. This has worked out well for me.
smt88 4 days ago [-]
Caffeine (like all stimulants) can alleviate symptoms of various dopamine-related disorders, like ADHD. I'm sure many people are self-medicating.
euroderf 19 hours ago [-]
When I'd quit coffee in my 20s and 30s I'd get serious headaches. In my 60s, no headaches at all.
CoffeeOnWrite 4 days ago [-]
When work was chill I went to decaf for the morning espresso on weekdays, and enjoyed real coffee on weekends. I took glee in withholding energy from work that I redirected to my personal time.
Then when work picked up, I went back to regular coffee everyday.
I don’t think there’s a hole in my soul though. And caffeine degrades my personality a little bit (to my own judgment).
z3c0 4 days ago [-]
This study considers caffeine concumption outside of coffee, so an alternative caffeine source might be worth looking into. That was my takeaway, at least. I also drink espresso, for the caffeine and the noticable ease on my gut compared to drip or pressed coffee.
fedeb95 4 days ago [-]
thirty-one participants were moderate coffee-drinkers (CD, i.e., people that usually consume between 3 to 5 cups of coffee per day).
3-5 is moderate? To me, 3 is already high.
Also, sample size is pretty low and they're all Irish.
p4bl0 4 days ago [-]
I agree. I'm deep into specialty coffee and I love making and drinking coffee a lot, but three cups is already higher than what I drink on a normal day. Also, most of the time when I go above this threshold, I drink decaf.
benhurmarcel 4 days ago [-]
I wonder how many grams of coffee beans they consider are in 1 cup though.
p4bl0 4 days ago [-]
Yes, that's a missing but crucial information indeed.
To be more precise about my previous message, when I say a cup I mean between 15g and 18g of beans.
fedeb95 1 days ago [-]
interesting! To me that's almost two cups for my moka.
kristofferR 4 days ago [-]
This study is Irish, so I think they likely use 170ml cups? That means a normal mug of ~500ml is 3 cups.
Perhaps they even use US coffee cup size, which is 118ml?
Honestly, using an unit of measurement that varies from 118ml to 250ml in a scientific paper brings the whole paper into question.
skrebbel 4 days ago [-]
> a normal mug of ~500ml
woa where is half a liter of coffee a "normal" portion?
tomjakubowski 4 days ago [-]
500mL is a pretty typical size for a travel mug/tumblr. I'd consider that two or three servings though.
sph 3 days ago [-]
500mL of Americano (diluted coffee) is not 500mL of espresso. I challenge you to drink half a litre of espresso in one sitting.
hootz 4 days ago [-]
Okay, you'll definitely have to explain the NORMAL mug of HALF A LITER!
It seems people think 500ml is more liquid than it is due to how thin cans/bottles are comparatively.
fc417fc802 4 days ago [-]
The reactions to your comment got me curious enough to check. The mug I use for coffee and tea holds almost exactly 400 mL when comfortably full and I used to drink 2 of those per day (across 12 hours or so). Based on that, personally I'd consider ~800 mL of black coffee to be on the high end of moderate consumption.
kristofferR 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, people think 400-500ml is a lot for some reason, but it’s not a abnormal coffee mug size at all. The Ember mug I have is around 430ml.
finghin 4 days ago [-]
I’m Irish.
A NORMAL mug of 500ml??? this is insanity to me
kristofferR 4 days ago [-]
I didn't say 500ml, I said ~500ml. 500ml is quite large, but 400+ ain’t really that abnormal.
ashirviskas 4 days ago [-]
Does it matter what size the cup is? Usually you get the same amount of coffee water + additional water/milk/whatever.
me-vs-cat 2 days ago [-]
What you're describing applies to coffee shops where a latte has the same amount of coffee regardless of the cup size.
Others are mostly describing someone who makes coffee for themself at home or in a break room. That person likely chooses a cup size depending on how much they coffee they want, how frequently they want a refill, etc.
fedeb95 1 days ago [-]
you're partially right. It doesn't matter if they had specified the grams of coffee beans they used to produce those cups. It would have been better to specify both number of cups and how they were produced.
SecretDreams 4 days ago [-]
????
SecretDreams 4 days ago [-]
I drink a small cup in the morning (like 250 ml) and 1-2 Moka pot espressos (like one shot). This typically happens between 7-10am. No more coffee after that most of the time. I like to keep it in the morning routine with breakfast. Green tea and water in my afternoons.
Personally, I don't feel any kind of "drug like" effects from this routine. I wonder about the strength of coffee people are drinking and the effects of drinking throughout the day rather than just the morning.
Anecdotally, during grad school I drank more per serving and throughout the day, and I certainly felt quite different than my current routine.
Like most things, I think people need to find some moderation/balance.
pillefitz 4 days ago [-]
It's less about the strength of coffee than about your metabolism. I used to be unaffected by caffeine, and now it takes a few sips in the morning to mess with my sleep in the evening - sth that started happening in my twenties I believe, possibly liver-related.
SecretDreams 4 days ago [-]
Interesting, do you have any good links for this?
I can have a coffee a bit before bed if I really want. I also used to think I had a "high metabolism", but don't say that anymore since it comes off as kind of bogus.
pillefitz 3 days ago [-]
Unfortunately no. It's my inference, given that 23andme didn't find any genetic indicator (CYP1A2) for slow metabolism, which is in line with my experience I got more sensitive over time.
So it must be some other mechanism that diminished enzyme production. Some of my liver (were those enzymes are produced) values were elevated over the last few years for no good reason, and I suspect the two could be related.
It's a bit annoying, as I'm reacting to trace amounts of caffeine in coffee, tea or chocolate, but I'm more worried about all the other, possibly carcinogenic, environmental toxins my liver won't be able to filter out.
ziml77 4 days ago [-]
One early in the morning, one maybe a bit before lunch, and one in the afternoon. Doesn't seem too out there. And you probably approach 5 cups if you're normalizing the size of a cup and seeing that people generally get bigger cups than that (I'd imagine one large cup in the morning and another in the afternoon would easily put you at 5 for the purposes of the study)
midtake 4 days ago [-]
Are the Irish unique when it comes to metabolizing coffee?
IAmBroom 4 days ago [-]
Local groups of people sometimes share genotype characteristics. Better studies use a broad spectrum of people - a less biased sample set.
So the answer to your question is: we can't know, from this study.
4 days ago [-]
TacticalCoder 4 days ago [-]
> 3-5 is moderate? To me, 3 is already high.
I'd say 3 is still moderate and really common. 5 is getting on the high'ish side.
Several of us here drink more than that.
jmhammond 4 days ago [-]
I drink “two cups a day.” But it’s like 24-30 ounces.
alexey-salmin 4 days ago [-]
I do 6-10 espresso cups per day, so 3-5 does sound very moderate.
andor 4 days ago [-]
It depends on how much caffeine is in your cup. Rather than measuring the size of a cup, I would go by the amount of coffee, as in the weight of the beans, used to brew it. The actual amount of caffeine is not as easy to measure, and even for the same kind of beans, there is natural variation.
For a traditional Italian espresso, about 7g of coffee beans are extracted. For a third-wave double espresso, it's usually 18g or more.
In my opinion, 10x7g is a lot. 2x12g is more than enough for me.
frm88 3 days ago [-]
Rather than measuring the size of a cup, I would go by the amount of coffee, as in the weight of the beans, used to brew it.
I feel this is more precise than the ml cup measuremnts, but if you wanted to be really precise, you'd have to specify the type of beans used (the caffeine content varies widely) and even the brewing method https://oldchicagocoffee.com/coffee-bean-caffeine-content-by....
And - there is an influence - even in the region the beans are grown. In the link I provided they even go so far as to differentiate as to genetics of the beans.
askvictor 4 days ago [-]
caffeine extraction is largely a function of time in contact with water. Espresso is quite quick brew, so has less caffeine than other brewing methods (yes, there are plenty of other factors)
Edd314159 4 days ago [-]
There is no realistic scenario where, no matter your extractions or bean selections, 6-10 shots of espresso a day is not an enormous amount of caffeine
criddell 4 days ago [-]
A grande americano at Starbucks is a 16 oz drink with three shots of espresso. Have one in the morning and one in the afternoon and you are at six shots of espresso. That doesn't seem all that enormous to me.
rpdillon 4 days ago [-]
75mg per shot = 450mg caffeine
That's a bit over the recommended limit of 400mg a day the Mayo Clinic, FDA, etc. recommend. Not sure it it qualifies as 'enormous' or not.
wang_li 4 days ago [-]
The amount of caffeine that humans require to live is 0 mg. So ...
IAmBroom 4 days ago [-]
Irrelevant to the question (How much is 'enormous'?).
wang_li 4 days ago [-]
It was a slight attempt to highlight that the conversation about a purely subjective thing is missing the point entirely. In the context of scientific discovery trying to qualify the outcome based on an individual's personal interpretation of descriptive words is a fool's errand. Attempting to justify one's personal habits or predilections is squarely in the flat earther camp of scientific belief.
MagicMoonlight 4 days ago [-]
That’s not normal. It’s like saying “I drink 6-10 beers a day so 3-5 is very moderate”
codazoda 4 days ago [-]
This paper is not saying coffee is bad.
If anything, it leans slightly toward beneficial or neutral effects.
What broader science says (not just this paper).
Across many large studies, Coffee is associated with:
* ↓ Lowerisk of Type 2 Diabetes
* ↓ risk of Parkinson’s Disease
* ↓ overall mortality (yes, really)
Downsides (for some people):
* Anxiety / jitters
* Poor sleep
* Increased heart rate
pinkmuffinere 4 days ago [-]
I’m super interested in this sort of study! However, it looks like n=62 here, which I think weakens the results —they’re probably just useful as suggestions of possible effects. Also, any food is expected to have similar effects on the microbiome. They didn’t test caffeine in isolation. In some ways that’s better (I don’t consume caffeine in isolation), but in some ways that’s less useful (it’s possible you get similar results from many random vegetables)
sixtyj 4 days ago [-]
In 1995, NASA did spiders experiment. Caffeine is a siginificant impulsivity trigger. :)
Don't ask me why some blogger posted the PDF in 2013, and also don't ask me how English Wikipedia editors determined that a Wordpress blog is a "Reliable Secondary Source". I did locate the original on NASA's own website. Public Domain (USGov).
Scipio_Afri 4 days ago [-]
What a find! It's on page 106 but I didn't immediately do a control-f to find it or look at the table of contents. My gosh, all the stuff I flipped through before that... some things haven't changed (e.g. Digikey and National Instruments ads).
khalic 4 days ago [-]
Thanks for the time capsule. Boy that’s a lot of ads (live video on a computer! Wow!).
The poor marijuana spider tried really hard
ivell 4 days ago [-]
LSD has unconnected strands in the air. I guess this is expected.
dotancohen 4 days ago [-]
The LSD and sleeping pills were not in the original study I believe. That might be an artists representation of the image at the bottom of the original study, which I remember showed the results in a single row.
jayd16 4 days ago [-]
Nice web, Mr. Crack spider.
bhaney 4 days ago [-]
> They didn’t test caffeine in isolation
But they did test both caffeinated and uncaffeinated coffee, and found the same effects in both, indicating that the effect is caused by something in coffee other than the caffeine
krige 4 days ago [-]
Doesn't decaf also contain caffeine, just a lot less of it?
anon84873628 4 days ago [-]
Typical extraction yield is 18-20%. For a 20g dose that's 4g of material consumed, or about 30 individual beans.
I wonder if you could find similar effects with 4g or broccoli sprouts, or garlic, or ginger, or cumin seed, shiitake mushroom, seaweed, soursop leaf, or...
throwatdem12311 4 days ago [-]
Caffeine is an extremely potent drug.
It’s actually kind of crazy to think that a large portion of a country’s population could be “high” on it basically all of the time. And there is a huge industry in place for delivering said drug to as many people as possible by having it available on almost every street corner.
And that most people take a fairly non-chalant attitude to giving this drug to kids through sweet drinks that are primarily marketed to them as well.
The scale of it is kinda mind boggling to me.
Mind the nonsensical rant, I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning…
Earw0rm 4 days ago [-]
That's normalising clean-ness (i.e. the state of being free of all psychoactive chemicals) perhaps too much.
The original humans adapted to a wide range of diets across the world (one reason why we're such a successful species), but most groups seem to consume mild psychoactives a lot (it's hard not to, so many wild plants have some level of activity) and seek out more powerful ones occasionally and for specific situations.
adammarples 4 days ago [-]
This week as I tried to lower my coffee usage or stop altogether, I had dropped from 3 cups a day to 1. That one suddenly started to make me feel noticeably high, like a bump of cocaine in the morning. I realised that I craved it in the same way and it clicked for me - coffee is literally just a drug I like to take by myself and read the newspaper. It's no different. It's the first thing I think of in the morning because I'm addicted. Currently trying to go cold turkey.
throwatdem12311 4 days ago [-]
I went from 60oz per day to 36oz. I went from perpetually stimulated to basically on stimulated during work hours. Even with a minor cutback, I’ve noticed the change in potency of an individual dose as well.
My next goal is to cut back to one fully caffeinated drink in the moring and then doing decaf the rest of the day.
The ritualistic habit is the hardest thing to break for me. Also the social aspect of “let’s go for coffee” with friends, family, spouse etc…
adammarples 4 days ago [-]
As it is with a lot of addictions
FireFjord 3 days ago [-]
How’s the cold turkey going so far?
adammarples 2 days ago [-]
I've been finding decaf coffee fills in the cravings
FrustratedMonky 4 days ago [-]
There is another huge industry to produce and deliver a pile of white powder to as many people as possible. Sugar. Highly refined, pure, hmmmm.
throwatdem12311 4 days ago [-]
Yup. Refined sugar probably is more dangerous to humans than caffeine even. Caffeine, to me at least, seems much less destructive in moderate long term use than sugar.
beej71 4 days ago [-]
I drank a lot of coffee until I forgot to pack instant on a 3 day backpacking trip. Headache the whole time that I cured in 5 minutes by drinking a mt dew the minute we got back to civilization. Figured it wasn't worth it and weaned off.
Then it turned out my rate of getting migraines dropped off considerably. But I love coffee, so I tried decaf. Migraines returned to being more frequent. So that was that.
If I could get it without the side effects, I surely would. Right now I'm drinking a hot cup of delicious roasted barley tea. But it's not the same.
Nifty3929 4 days ago [-]
PSA: decaffeinated coffee contains about 1/3 as much caffeine as regular - so far from caffeine free.
mbil 4 days ago [-]
It depends of course but typically it’s more like 3% the caffeine of regular coffee
culi 3 days ago [-]
That's not accurate. In an 8oz cup of decaf there's 2–15 mg of caffeine. Regular coffee is about 91 mg for an 8oz cup
dghughes 4 days ago [-]
I never used to drink any caffeine. In fact the few times I had tried it when I was a teen or my 20s it made my chest pound my heart raced so much. It was Lebanese strong cardamom coffee so maybe not the best example.
Then at age 34 I started a new job my first shift work job, late evenings, some overnight jobs. I started off with fancy coffee like french vanilla. A year or so later the first Starbucks opened. I was drinking venti quad shot lattes.
Then energy drinks were permitted for sale here (we had a can ban for years). I recall after drinking a Rockstar 750ml for breakfast and the following muscle spasms made me consider I should tone it down.
So I've settled a bit a small coffee in the evening. Sometimes I don't even finish it.
dgllghr 4 days ago [-]
I switched from caffeine (coffee) to theacrine (pills) and I like it so much more. I feel alert and focused without added anxiety. It doesn’t seem to affect my sleep at all. I really didn’t like how hard it was to quit coffee.
I don’t like that it’s a pill. I tried making my own theacrine drinks, but theacrine is so bitter that I never found one that I liked. I am still haunted by the chicory + theacrine drink I made…
nchmy 4 days ago [-]
It's always amusing to read the self-narratives of a bunch of unacknowledged drug addicts when links like this get posted.
culi 3 days ago [-]
Read the very first paragraph of this paper:
> Moderate coffee consumption is associated with various health benefits, including reduced risks of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer3. In a large cross-sectional study of 468,629 individuals without clinical cardiovascular disease, light-to-moderate coffee consumption was linked to lower rates of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke incidence4. Furthermore, coffee intake is consistently associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in a dose-dependent manner, across multiple human cohorts5,6,7. Meta-analyses have also found that coffee consumers face a lower risk of depression8,9, and one meta-analysis of cohort studies examining cognitive decline, showed that coffee consumption accounted for a 27% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease10.
nchmy 3 days ago [-]
I don't see what relevance your comment has to mine...
culi 2 days ago [-]
You are under the impression that this paper is negative on the health effects of coffee when in fact it is glowing about its health benefits from the onset
nchmy 2 days ago [-]
You're under the impression that I was commenting on the paper. I was commenting on the drug addicts commenting in this thread
schnitzelstoat 4 days ago [-]
It has some genuine benefits though like for liver health, for example [1]. Alcohol does the opposite.
There's a study that'll say pretty much anything. That's not my point though. Just that most people talking that get enthused about any of this are drug addicts who refuse to recognize it.
sph 3 days ago [-]
"To prove I wasn't addicted I stopped for a week. I felt depressed and tired. I'm back to my 3 cups of coffee a day as it cures my depression."
— every HN thread about coffee
mamunmia 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
GuinansEyebrows 4 days ago [-]
unfortunately, it's never amusing to read the thinly-veiled self-narratives of the condescending when comments like this get posted.
subjectsigma 2 days ago [-]
We get it, you think you’re better than everyone else
nchmy 2 days ago [-]
Nope. I'm also an addict, but aware of it rather than trying to "optimize my dosing"
maininformer 4 days ago [-]
Habitual anything intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition
satvikpendem 4 days ago [-]
What's cool is this effect exists even in decaf coffee, as someone who primarily drinks decaf black, for flavor and for a good night's rest as I'm sensitive to caffeine.
Kelteseth 4 days ago [-]
What kind of decaf coffee do you drink? There are differences between the cheap chemical Methylene way to create decaf coffee and the expensive co2 way to get rid of the caffeine.
I'm pretty sure I'm allergic to methylene-decaffeinated coffee. I discovered in the early 1990s that I'd get sneezy almost every time I drink decaf office coffee, but my home decaf didn't do that to me.
Hasn't happened in a long time, probably due to (1) avoiding cheap decaf and (2) the banning of meth-coffee (heh) in the US.
Schlagbohrer 4 days ago [-]
Is that methylene way even legal? It basically uses petroleum fuel in the process right? I assume it was outlawed a long time ago but that might be extreme naievete for US regulatory capability...
eichin 4 days ago [-]
https://www.thedecafproject.com/ (Dec 2024) let you order matching swiss water, CO₂, and Ethyl Acetate (sugar cane byproduct) decaffeinated coffee from the same batches of beans. The EPA banned methylene chloride earlier in that year, but because of toxicity to workers, not because of risk from the resulting coffee itself (and it looks like the FDA didn't ban it.) So I guess you couldn't make decaf with it in the US but you could probably still import and sell it?
satvikpendem 4 days ago [-]
I don't buy the methylene processed ones, generally it's Swiss water processed or like you said the CO2 processed ones.
Projectiboga 4 days ago [-]
Here is a fun citation with a brief summary. They suggest regular caffine use lowers your baseline and it just returns you to where you'd be if you weren't dependent.
University of Bristol. "Coffee consumption unrelated to alertness: Stimulating effects may be illusion, study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 June 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm>.
lanstin 4 days ago [-]
It allows you to rearrange your alertness budget in time if not in total.
culi 3 days ago [-]
It allows the human to form a more effective cog
ANarrativeApe 4 days ago [-]
It would have been interesting to see if there was any difference relating to CYP1A2 (Cytochrome P450 1A2), the fast metabolizers and the slow metabolizers.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4 days ago [-]
> The coffee provided was consumed with a quantity of hot water, milk, sugar chosen by the participant.
Could it be the sugar?
hpeinar 4 days ago [-]
A very interesting article, I have personal experience with:
> Coffee also affects the gastrointestinal tract. It increases stomach acidity and stimulates the release of hormones that aid digestion. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee promote the contractility of ileal and colonic smooth muscle, helping prevent constipation
As the two times in my adult life I've tried to make an intended break from coffee, it has ended up with almost unbearable stomach pain caused by constipation.
It's good to know that this is not linked to caffeine as I thought, so I will try un-caffinated coffee instead now because I tend to think that my general "tiredness" comes from actual caffeine.
trillic 4 days ago [-]
I've found hot water has the same laxative effect as coffee in the form of herbal tea.
Same ritual each morning without the unknown dosing of a stimulant drug.
irthomasthomas 4 days ago [-]
Can you actually get caffeine free coffee? I thought most decaf brands where only about 50% less.
hrldcpr 4 days ago [-]
You're right that the caffeine isn't entirely removed, but it's supposedly more than 90% removed.
(I'm even seeing the number 97% mentioned a lot online.)
jeffbee 4 days ago [-]
That fraction is going to depend a lot on the definition and the reference. I believe the 97% is the US standard for how much of the natural caffeine in green beans must be removed. You will note how this can be manipulated by using a more caffeine-abundant variety. EU standards are more sensible, stated in terms of caffeine content in the final product.
Either way, commercial decaf processes and normal brewing methods will yield something like 5-10mg of caffeine in a "decaf" dose of coffee, which is an order of magnitude less than usual.
winrid 4 days ago [-]
The bean is already only like 2% caffeine lol so cheap decaf can definitely really be "half caf" even if they say that.
haffi112 3 days ago [-]
I stopped drinking coffee for four or five years. I drank a lot before. You do realise that it has a strong psychoactive effect, at least it did for me.
I still don't drink coffee, but I started experimenting with paraxanthine and I absolutely love it (paraxanthine is the primary metabolite of caffeine and is also a stimulant). I feel like it gives me most of the benefit of caffeine with very few downsides (no jitters, no crash, exits your system faster).
getnormality 4 days ago [-]
Coffee modifies physiology and cognition? You're telling me this for the first time.
alecco 4 days ago [-]
The paper is about previously unknown ways coffee affects the body.
ButlerianJihad 4 days ago [-]
I was so surprised at this headline that I nearly leapt out of my chair!
jonplackett 4 days ago [-]
But it says it’s the same for decaf. That is more interesting
aitchnyu 4 days ago [-]
Been treating coffee as caffeine with aroma. Any important points about coffee itself?
triage8004 4 days ago [-]
Humans known since 45 minutes after first drink
BrandoElFollito 4 days ago [-]
I am reading the comments and wonde about the spread of individual sensitivity.
I drink 3 to 6 Nespresso coffees daily, at various times, including shortly before going to bed. Sometimes I don't drink at all for a few days.
I don't feel any effects related to the number, or whether I drink it or not. Sure, this is subjective but when I compare myself to the stories of the commenters I start to wonder if there is any caffeine at all in what I drink.
reedf1 4 days ago [-]
At least subjectively, coffee seems to help my memory. But maybe that's why I started drinking coffee?
I would probably drop coffee it was proven to have negative effects on memory.
bboozzoo 4 days ago [-]
> But maybe that's why I started drinking coffee?
you don't remember why, do you?
layer8 4 days ago [-]
I’m drinking to forget. ;)
arnejenssen 4 days ago [-]
I am not a coffee drinker, but I met with a friend at a cafe who said he was going to get a cup of insect poison, referring to coffee :)
tootie 4 days ago [-]
Caffeine evolved to deter insects. Coffee, tea, chocolate and some other plants all evolved caffeine independently due to similar evolutionary pressure.
deepsun 4 days ago [-]
What surprises me is how many people drink coffee first thing in the morning. The organism is literally in wake-up mode, with cortisol spiking ~30min after wake up. So you get a caffeine AND a spike in cortisol at the same time.
Better to wait at least couple of hours after waking up.
poly2it 4 days ago [-]
> ... reintroduction triggered acute microbiome changes independent of caffeine.
This sounds interesting. I've never really considered the constituents of coffee other than caffeine and what unique effects they may bring.
I wonder if I would experience behavioral effects if I replaced my coffee intake with caffeinated non-coffee drinks or pills?
kulahan 4 days ago [-]
Studies seem to indicate that coffee is at least as healthy, if not healthier than tea, and I have not heard this about caffeine specifically (aka the same effects coming from pills or energy drinks).
One fun fact: we still haven’t figured out why coffee makes us poop. We’ve studied every chemical in there and can’t seem to find a link, but the association is uh… well-known.
hermitcrab 4 days ago [-]
>why coffee makes us poop.
That seems to vary wildly between individuals. It doesn't have that effect on me.
wjnc 4 days ago [-]
I have not much followed the science of gut microbiome and psychology. Is this really going where this article is pointing? That we can tease out causation in foods and habits via gut microbiome towards behavior and psychology? Pretty rad.
colechristensen 4 days ago [-]
Yeah there's nontrivial evidence that among other things, the complex community living inside you manipulates your brain.
ButlerianJihad 4 days ago [-]
My psychiatrists agree that “hallucination” (in lay terms: “hearing voices” or “seeing things”) only refers to things that aren’t real.
chneu 4 days ago [-]
There's a decent amount of research going into the hormones that our GI biome produce and how it affects us. Our body has a few different biomes and they all seem to play somewhat important roles.
mskogly 4 days ago [-]
We know, that’s why we do it.
rubslopes 4 days ago [-]
Was this thread invaded by AI? Casually reading the first comments, 3 different users mentioned they had a recent "mental health incident" related to caffeine??
Search this page for "mental health incident"
fc417fc802 4 days ago [-]
That doesn't seem even remotely surprising to me. Much of the readership here likely consumes inadvisable quantities of caffeine nearly every day and one of the most common side effects is anxiety followed closely by a number of other emotional perturbations.
proggy 4 days ago [-]
Possibly AI, possibly younger folks (18-24). “Mental health incident” is only one step removed from algospeak like “unalived”, “seggs”, and “neurospicy”. A detached, memetic phrase that has been implanted into the lexicon by a toxic brew of algorithmic social media moderation and heavy exposure to LLM conversational patterns.
IAmBroom 4 days ago [-]
Or maybe just because language patterns change over time. You need to be hep to the new jive, daddy-o.
3 days ago [-]
sdevonoes 4 days ago [-]
I must be weird, but coffee (or caffeine) doesn’t really “wake me up” in the mornings and I could drink it in the night and still sleep well. Because of that I don’t drink coffee; I prefer tea
opan 4 days ago [-]
I find that the effects can be pretty subtle, and if I'm already tired there's usually no coming back. What I think has worked best for me is to re-up on caffeine a few hours before I think I'll be tired, or around when a previous dose is wearing off. Also, if trying to stay awake, food and entertainment are also quite important. If I hit a point where I'm hungry, cold, and tired, and going to the kitchen to eat sounds like a chore, it's usually too late for me. When the bed's closer, it's hard to resist.
I've also noticed that I have a sort of natural energy in the morning. I think of it as being similar to how a seed has enough energy in itself to sprout and then get sunlight. It's probably so I can make myself eat and whatnot. I don't really need caffeine to "wake up" as much as I need it to stay awake later in the day, and even if I do have a coffee with breakfast, I'll often get tired before the normal day is over.
ziml77 4 days ago [-]
I also don't find that caffeine wakes me up or keeps me alert. I used to have it a ton because I like the taste but then mostly stopped because I was having some anxiety issues and wanted to be sure caffeine wasn't a factor. Stopping it was zero problem at all for me, which doesn't align with what others say about stopping consumption. I don't know if my body's metabolism of it is super fast or if my brain is weird in some undiagnosed way that prevents the caffeine from working "correctly"
vjerancrnjak 4 days ago [-]
I think this description is often associated with ADHD memes.
I can't find it now but I once read that people who report the "paradoxical reaction" to stimulants have a significantly better outcome from stimulant medications, and both those values seem to have higher heritability than ADHD as a whole, possibly even linked to a single gene.
fedeb95 4 days ago [-]
tea also has caffeine, although in smaller quantities. Maybe you mean that you don't care so you go by taste, just specifying because there's a common misconception about tea not having caffeine.
Lionga 4 days ago [-]
Some tea has caffeine, most has don't.
pasquinelli 4 days ago [-]
all tea has caffeine unless it's decaf. some things that aren't tea are called tea casually, but they aren't tea, for instance peppermint "tea" is not tea. by the same logic that one would call peppermint a tea, one would have to call coffee a tea. and beef broth.
majkinetor 4 days ago [-]
That depends on culture. All camelia s. teas have it (green etc) but almost none of common herbal teas in Europe have it (chamomile, menta, sage etc.) They are not called casually teas.
pasquinelli 4 days ago [-]
> They are not called casually teas.
are you saying chamomile isn't called tea but it's one of the teas without caffeine? if so that's very confused.
camelia sinensis is tea. when i said that other things are casually called tea, i mean that what chamomile tea, for example, ought to be called is a tisane or an herbal infusion. casually, people might call it a tea; some people are so casual about it that they think it actually is tea. but it isn't.
Lionga 4 days ago [-]
no true scotsman tea. Tea is what is called tea. You can not just decide that you don't like some teas so they are not tea anymore.
pasquinelli 4 days ago [-]
did you check wikipedia and found it agrees with me before you came up with that?
fedeb95 1 days ago [-]
"tea" is a word that many use to indicate anything infused. But tea is anything that comes from camelia sinensis, while other beverages are more correctly called infusions. Camelia sinensis has caffeine.
shinryuu 4 days ago [-]
Would be real interesting to see a similar study on tea.
silver911r 4 days ago [-]
Every study like this should clearly state who paid for it.
Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee
jcalvinowens 4 days ago [-]
I used to drink a small amount of blisteringly strong coffee in the morning and after lunch, but nowadays I drink a massive amount of relatively weak coffee throughout the entire day. Weaker than you'd ever get from a shop or in an office.
That's been a big win for me: I feel like I get to enjoy the coffee more, and it eliminated the negative effects for me.
I no longer feel like I suffer when I don't have it. I miss it, the way I miss the sunlight in my office on a cloudy morning, but it's strictly a positive for me when it's around. I only get headaches if I go from 100 to 0, even one day of reduced intake is enough to avoid it for me.
When I'm exhausted and going to bed, I'll go fill the coffee machine, and catch myself thinking "oh boy, it's going to feel so great to wake up at 6am and drink this". Then I shake my head at myself and laugh and how absurd that sounds :D
Coffee is above running hot water in my hierarchy of needs. Seriously. If I were forced to choose between coffee and alcohol for the rest of my life, I'd choose coffee in a heartbeat.
WesleyJohnson 4 days ago [-]
This discussion has been particularly insightful. I'm 47 and have been drinking 2 to 3 Mtn Dew Kickstarts a day for probably 10 years. I don't feel high, or jittery, or like I'm bouncing off walls. I have no trouble falling asleep, even drinking caffeine right up until bed time. But, I also have trouble focusing, am working with a psychologist on a possible ADHD (primarily inattentive) diagnosis, never dream, and am very forgetful.
Based on everything I'm reading below, and a "discussion" with Gemini, it's highly probable all of this is related. I know AI isn't a doctor, and confirmation bias and all of that, but even if it's all nonsense - backing off on caffeine or quitting entirely can only help.
So I'm going to star to day, by trying to not have any after 2pm. My regular bedtime is around midnight, so that's 10 hours. We'll see how it goes.
Thanks HN!
username135 4 days ago [-]
If coffee was a god, I would pray to it.
homeonthemtn 4 days ago [-]
Yes, well, nevertheless. Sip
neya 4 days ago [-]
The only good thing that keeps me from collapsing into a state of limbo is coffee and now, even that's bad (seems more like a mixed bag, but still)? Sigh.
cyberpunk 4 days ago [-]
Maybe I have some neurological issue or something but whenever I quit coffee I find it extremely difficult to maintain any kind of motivation to sit in an open plan office and code. Coffee makes me a worker bee, I can understand why employers give it away for free.
So, the coffee stays for now.
neya 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, exactly. I can totally relate to this. I have actually monitored my productivity on an excel sheet and the days with coffee win by a large margin. I am not sure if it's withdrawal symptoms on the days without, though.
anon84873628 4 days ago [-]
Don't fret. You're allowed to enjoy things that aren't part of the scientific reductionist longevity influencer lifestyle fad :)
antonvs 4 days ago [-]
Nitpick: What you’re referring to is not scientific.
bee_rider 4 days ago [-]
There have been positive and negative reports for a long long time. If coffee was going to kill us, I’d certainly have died in school!
kulahan 4 days ago [-]
Coffee in general is unreasonably healthy as a beverage. The overwhelming majority of science agrees it’s a quality health drink.
Relax. Tomorrow there will be a paper/article saying coffee is great for you.
fransje26 4 days ago [-]
Did you know:
By replacing your morning coffee with herbal tea, you can remove up to 87% of the little joy you still have left in your life. /s
Keep the coffee buddy.
neya 4 days ago [-]
Haha, that was a funny quote!
xingyi_dev 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
therealdeal2020 4 days ago [-]
good thing I have claude to summarize this and quickly realized that sample size was small and nothing much new unless you are a microbiome researcher
reliablereason 4 days ago [-]
If the effect size is big small sample sizes does not matter as much as otherwise.
You really have to look at the power analysis and the sample size together.
Saying this as a general truth. I am not sure about the power of the method in this papper, i only read the abstract.
neuroelectron 4 days ago [-]
I only use caffeine or caffeinated beverages such as coffee at the most three times a week. And that's a heavy week for me.
SummSolutions 4 days ago [-]
Congrats to this team, providing exceptional research on how coffee affects us physically and mentally. I think moderation is key.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4 days ago [-]
"These findings reveal previously unrecognised effects of coffee on the microbiota–gut–brain axis, suggesting that microbiome profiles could potentially predict coffee consumption patterns", or, perhaps, just ask the patient?
raincole 4 days ago [-]
Could you elaborate on how to interpret your comment without it leading to anti-intellectualism?
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4 days ago [-]
It was a joke
colechristensen 4 days ago [-]
You are missing the point.
If you can predict someone's coffee intake based on testing of their microbiome then you've proven that coffee intake has predictable effects on the microbiome.
The important part isn't predicting coffee use, it's just the proof that there's you can predict and perhaps control in the opposite direction leading to more research.
This has let me evaluate what caffeine does with fresh eyes, so to say, because I can now consume it occasionally while having many non-caffeinated days to compare to. It's a profoundly psychoactive substance and does a lot of things to cognition. I guess I have decided I don't enjoy how it feels, having previously been dependent on it.
Going caffeine-free made it much easier to lose weight as I have far less cravings for high carbs and sugar now, presumably this is related to the impulsivity impact talked about in the paper.
Going caffeine-free also made me very depressed for a while with severe anhedonia, this lasted way longer (like 3-4 months) than one would generally expect for caffeine withdrawal symptoms.
I had seemingly become so used to the increased dopamine signaling while buzzed on caffeine that my brain was a mess for a rather extended period of time as it got used to not having it.
Overall I view quitting as a positive for me, but I'd warn anyone thinking about doing it to do it carefully and closely monitor their mental health. AFAIK the impacts of quitting can be quite different for different people, so my experience may differ than that of others, but I had no idea how much of a (temporary) mental health crash quitting caffeine could cause until I experienced it.
Also positive in the long-term for me. Fewer digestive issues, less spiky dopamine sensitive or impulsiveness and performance during the day, better memory. I wish it weren't so.
But damn was the 3-6 months of anhedonia awful. I still feel pangs of it.
The ensuing several months were some of the worst in my life (many confounding variables) missing coffee, feeling anhedonic, and inadequately caffeinated/lucid to tackle my problems.
You might want to look at this pathway, and the enzymes, and the cofactors for these enzymes:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pingyuan-Gong/publicati...
Tyrosine 3-monooxygenase (TH) needs Iron
Aromatic-L-amino-acid decarboxylase (DDC) needs B6
That's surprising to me. In my case one of the reasons I discontinued it (emotional effects aside) was mild but consistent weight loss. The stimulant part of the effect seems to suppress my appetite quite effectively although at least part of that is likely indirect due to sustained task focus leading me to skip meals.
I think this is one of those YMMV things with caffeine.
It is an appetite suppressant in general but for me it seems to cause a significant rebound effect.
On caffeine I would eat less early in the day (when I was most using caffeine) but then I would get severe cravings for carbs/sugar later at night.
Without the caffeine everything is nice and evened out and I feel way more in control of my eating habits without really trying.
So yes, coffee is an appetite suppressant, but 6-8 hours later your appetite rebounds. Many people don't feel this effect simply because they have frequent-enough meals and/or coffees to stay ahead of the blood sugar crash. If you get into intermittent fasting, it's pretty easy to notice. In my quest to fix my metabolism, I am constantly aware that my morning cup of coffee is the biggest reasons why I get ravenous around 5pm.
Turns out I needed stimulants from time to time, just not that one.
I'm pondering getting a coffee machine at home. 400 EUR is not a sizable investment and one I'd have forgotten about it 3 months but I'm getting cold feet when it gets to committing.
Americano coffee definitely picks me up and is a full net positive for me. But that's only if I drink 2-3 times a week. Not sure how it's going to be if I start getting it every day.
Caffeine makes me feel like I'm overclocked, but Adderall lets me run tasks async. The latter is so much more preferable for dealing with the demands of life.
Medicate at 4pm, then I know I can effortlessly interleave chores, family time, social obligations, and my own creative pursuits. Otherwise I'd spend my evenings on the couch stuck trying to offload unsolved problems of the workday.
Vigorous exercise accomplishes the same thing, but I can't always make that happen "as-needed".
I just need something like the Americano every now and then really.
I agree on vigorous exercise completely. My last two jobs have been (well, the current one still is) hugely demanding and that led to me dropping a lot of exercise. Still trying to understand why and to undo that because I gained back 5kg (sigh).
Tried Earl Grey too. It's actually awesome but I must be careful; easy to go above a certain dose that just tires me and makes me crash.
One thing I'll try before considering the coffee machine really seriously: theacrine pills. I'll give them 2-3 weeks and will make a decision.
My stimulant of choice now is low-dose nicotine patches which I feel is extremely underrated, and demonised because of the effects of smoking and vaping. Mind you: I am an ex-smoker and I am quite aware of how strong the addiction can be, yet pure nicotine is the most mellow stimulant there is.
It's been 2 years now since I replaced my ADHD medication with nicotine and I haven't felt the need to increase the dosage. It's cheaper, lasts MUCH longer, doesn't cause anxiety and it doesn't push you around like amphetamine.
YMMV.
Highly unlikely that 2-3 times a week will last though - either religiously stick to once a week or be open to drinking it daily.
What's good about the aero-press and the French press btw? I am only just trying to understand the landscape.
Americano means nothing - its just diluted strong coffee (eg espresso, moka pot). You probably need to learn how much actual coffee your body can handle.
I handle very little, so have a 1 cup moka pot which takes 9-10g of ground coffee. And that's pushing my upper limit. My body can usually handle better a very unsatisfying 6-7g brewed. I need to find some good decaf... (though I have a line on Laurina coffee, which has half as much caffeine. Hopefully I can get some soon).
French press is just a really easy way to get a great cup of coffee. You don't even need one - you could just make cowboy coffee (grounds in hot water) and carefully decant it out at after 5-10 min. Look up James Hoffman french press method. His aeropress series is good too.
You also need to learn that all of this stuff that everyone says is just drug addict self-talk coping. You only actually get a boost at first, and then your body adapts and is in caffeine deficit and is just trying to get back to baseline with more coffee.
The healthiest way to do any of this would be to try as you said (but likely unsuccessfully) to limit your coffee intake to 2-3 days a week, so that you might actually get a kick rather than just sustain your addiction. Once a week as a special occasion might be more successful. It should be treated as a healthy person treats alcohol...
I'm not even joking with all this drug addict talk.
How big is your moka pot? A "4 cup" Bialetti takes around 16-18g of coffee, which isn't a lot.
No matter how dilute your end product is, the amount of caffeine consumed will roughly be about the same. But I guess diluting it means you take longer to consume all that caffeine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mokapot/comments/1p61tgb/how_much_c...
Ps Check out moka pot voodoo on YouTube, if you haven't already. I almost never make a bad brew now (except for literally just now, but was with a new bean, roasted darker than usual. Will grind finer next time).
The moka pot would be better if you have easy access to cooking facilities (the stainless versions are also easier to clean, and work on induction).
The AeroPress would be better if you only have access to hot water.
It's too concentrated.
An Aeropress is less concentrated in my experience, and it's pretty easy to use. I prefer iced coffee unless it's cold out, so I fill the collector with ice before I brew. The melted water dilutes it nicely, in my opinion.
Get an Aeropress, or Hario Switch, or Clever dripper. A kettle and some filters. For beans buy from roasters that do light/meduim roasts, and print a recent roasting date on the package/website. The only expensive item should be a grinder, look at 1zpresso Q/Air/X or Kingrinder K6 if you want to limit price.
What I am mostly looking for is some sort of an easy access to a diluted coffee like the Americano, really. I am OK with buying 1-2kg of beans because I am fairly sure that's going to last me 3-6 months. Cleaning the machine I've done in offices -- 3 minute job.
But any more commitment just sounds tiring. I am not a coffee connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. But light caffeine doses absolutely do help me in very measurable ways. I need easy access to that.
Buying a coffee machine is not a big commitment obviously, I am just afraid I'll deem the experiment unsuccessful in a month and then I'll have a nice machine lying around doing nothing that I can't easily sell.
This style, pour over machine that grinds itself, but uses all water you put in, so it's not fully automatic.
It's automatic enough, but also very cheap. Maybe even ⅒ of a price of a fancy espresso machine. And you can add "too much" water (than the setting you set) to make lighter coffee.
But I have to agree with others: for my diluted espresso desires, I used (and still have) an Aeropress for years and it's simply fantastic. Low cost, almost zero maintenance, good results. Very similar output to an americano though lower on crema.
That's the main reason I'm leaning towards Delonghi Magnifica Start. It has a button for Americano. I tried moka pot coffee + diluting it with hot water. It's not the same. :(
(That's technically an Australian long black but I like it better - it leaves the crema on top.)
(Buy used for even better value. Hand grinders last forever.)
For a similar coffee with more manual work, get a Chemex
I have a very nice grinder: a solis caffissima digital coffee grinder. It is available under a different brand name in the US I think.
I make filter coffee with a very basic earthenware filter holder with melitta high quality yet very normal filters and sometimes I mix it up with an aeropress which offers a different type of taste because of the low acidity way of making coffee. I just drip the coffee into a nice thermos so I can make 4 cups in one go and just pour from the thermos.
My coffee is much nicer than I get in most places, both professional and at homes and it doesn’t cost me a lot in effort, money and, very importantly, workspace footprint.
Espresso machines require a lot of space and maintenance and trouble to make.
Having said all this, I am quite intrigued about all the stories about the negative effects of coffee. I just thought it was about influencing sleep, but I had never thought about the memory and mood effects. I will study this some more in the coming months.
I think caffeine is legitimately more disruptive and addictive than is commonly acknowledged. It creates quite a life-style loop where you need it for [drive, energy, mood, alertness] as a fix to many of the issues it causes, lol. Caffeine is such a widely used drug yet doesn't seem to have been studied that much. It's fascinating to me how the drugs that are socially acceptable seem completely arbitrary. Like alcohol (which in terms of addictiveness isn't far behind the most addictive drugs.)
In tables that compare the most addictive drugs, you know what drug is always missing yet seems to be consumed more widely than any other recreational drug on the planet: caffeine. This is funny though. It may be difficult to actually do high quality, comparative research on caffeine because to do so you would need to find people who don't already consume caffeine and I suspect that is a harder problem than it sounds.
By the way: the set of people who have never been effected by caffeine shrinks even further if you consider whether the mother consumed it during pregnancy.
What if long term caffeine use causes some of the adhd symptoms? It interesting to ponder because if I stop using caffeine for a month, some of my adhd symtoms go away completely. I've done stints of complete caffeine breaks, content consumption breaks (one week or more without screens) and I felt amazing and alive. The first couple of days of using caffeine feels amazing but then I feel dead inside again and live like a robot. So in my mind, caffeine is my main target when I try to adjust my routine/behaviours.
I do have a professional diagnosis for ADHD.
After leaving that job, I now consume fairly regularly (for the past decade at least). I can still easily skip days without coffee, though I do prefer having it daily. I literally see no difference in my day to day between having coffee and not throughout my two decades of experience with coffee. I can just as easily fall asleep after a coffee and I rarely feel amped up from a coffee (if I do, then I just stop drinking it). I've certainly never felt anhedonia like many others have mentioned in the comments when I've taken breaks from coffee.
I think it's clear that people have different experiences with substances. Whether mine is a common one or not, I cannot say. But I do have a baseline to compare to and I can legitimately say the only thing that has ever caused me anhedonia was burning out from too much work (during burn out I was still consuming coffee and it didn't improve my mental state at all).
I couldn't drink coffee or alcohol during those 4 weeks, and notice that I didn't get any migraines after those 4 weeks even when I, for the past 12 years, knew exactly how I got them reliably.
I didn't make sense to me to keep drinking coffee because the benefits of coffee which for me was mostly ritual and taste, didn't outweight the weight of having a migraine for sure if I slept a minute less than 8hrs.
Mind you, I'm talking about a cup almost everyday with milk, ice coffee in the mornings.
After reevaluating your comment and my experience I declare that coffee is not always a cause of mental health incidents, sometimes it might help people.
I recently traveled and didn't have coffee for more than a week. No change I could feel, no craving, nothing. But one of my ex-gf was quite sensitive on many things, had frequent headaches, low blood pressure and coffee was helping with those visibly. So YMMV.
Edit: this is especially relevant here, as the study found similar effects in decaffeinated coffee drinkers. So the effects they observed, if real, are not related to caffeine.
Very interested.
I am a regular coffee drinker, mostly limited to very early morning (e.g. 5-7 am). Also consume celsius here and there when I want to minimize stomach disruption in the morning (e.g. I am about to run).
But have also used THC in the past (no longer, major anxiety inducer for me). Alcohol like so many people. And more recently went on an assisted MDMA/ketamine therapy journey that continues to amaze me in its impact (in all good ways).
Asking as I am reducing caffeine slowly right now and curious what folks are seeing as differences on/off in real terms.
I have better mood, presence of mind and working memory in the morning, especially compared to caffeinated peers. I'm also a lot more aware of when I've woken up from a bad night's sleep (see paragraph 5).
I have much less mid-day dysregulation/impulses compared to caffeinated peers. No predictable afternoon slump either – but a rich lunch will always leave me foggy, lol. If it's the weekend, I'll often join my young kid for the afternoon nap and fall asleep in minutes – the 30-45 min nap usually feels amazing.
Coffee really feels to me now like the psychoactive substance it is. I've had anxiety issues for other reasons in recent years, and today a cup of caffeinated coffee will often trigger a good level of anxiety if I'm not physically active during the peak. The physical symptoms of both are very similar. If I'm moving about, it usually feels good, like something hyped me up, but the sensation comes on its own instead.
Anxiety greatly changes my sleep needs, and caffeine and alcohol both hid these sensations in the past, enough that I suspect I didn't have the interoception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception) to consciously notice and adjust in the past, which would leave me stuck or spiraling in terms of maintenance/recovery, probably for weeks at a time.
In recent days (pretty low anxiety! knock on wood) I have sleep that's almost 2hrs shorter per night, waking up naturally. That came very progressively (sleep quality), then very suddenly (lower needs). Also a great gain, though I also aged a decade and that must contribute as well.
Note that I faded out caffeine by progressively substituting for decaf. No headaches this way (from a peak of ~4 cups a day, I would say?). It sounds like you're doing the same, which I really recommend! There's no need to self-flagellate on top of what's usually a major habit adjustment.
My cognition in my 40s is now better than it was at 26, at 37 before I started this routine I thought my engineering career was over, the post lunch crash, the mental tiredness, just terrible.
The fact that we build our brain work spaces so distant from physical movement is bad for our mental health, our soles, our souls, and doing untold economic damage to our country (the u.s. in my case.), I tried lunch walks for years and it's just too fucking boring, cycling is great, after work I rollerblade and it's so mentally engaging and distinct it obliterates the after work fog.
But the effect quickly drops to almost nothing very rapidly. I started having caffeine 3 out of 7 days because having a low caffeine tolerance was too annoying. One coke, tea, chocolate would completely destroy my sleep.
Much less anxious now too, but that's more likely due to ADHD meds.
Fantastic book. I first encountered it...in a coffee shop :) Read a chapter and immediately bought the book for myself.
(But I never had any mental-health incidents, and I drink a lot of it, more than all people that I personally know.)
I also had a very big life altering mental health incident very recently, drank A LOT of coffee during and I feel it helped, now I am much more calm, "more correct" despite drinking coffee like before.
Based on this I posit that coffee is used by humans to offset unwanted mentality changes, not a cause of unwanted mentality changes.
When I quit I get splitting headaches that are way more severe than a typical tension headache. Completely debilitating without medication. Get them for a week or so (also get the muddier thinking but I could live with that).
coffee is caffeine plus THOUSANDS of compounds interacting with each other and your body: some of them are protective for the heart for example.
That's why synthetic caffeine is bad, while coffee is overall good in moderation.
That's why more people die from energy drinks than from coffe in coffeeshop hehe
But then I found out I can drink coffee just fine, even 5 cups per day.
Now I'm thinking it was the artificial sweetener.
I jog every day and enjoy vs I don't exercise but I occasionally sprint and I feel awful after.
It likely was a contributor, insofar as the incident had poor sleep as a contributing factor, and I do know with some certainty the caffeine habit had been causing some (likely not all) of my sleep problems. I can also tell you the very worst day of that incident was when I mistakenly consumed caffeine again prior to being recovered enough for that to be safe; that was a horrible glimpse at what that drug can do to you when you're in an already very unstable state. Caffeine definitely can aggravate all kinds of symptoms, even when you're in a relatively stable state. It's a stimulant, after all.
But I think caffeine consumption is… only one factor of many in causes of that incident, and doesn't deserve any special blame. The relevance of the mental health incident here is really that it gave me a chance and a good reason to abruptly stop, and therefore also the opportunity to see what getting the brain back into the caffeination ritual again feels like. (I've tried taking it for a few consecutive days more than once since then, and not particularly enjoyed it. I've also tried it on single isolated days.)
Behaviourally, coffee drinkers exhibited greater impulsivity and emotional reactivity, whereas non-coffee drinkers demonstrated better memory performance.
I don't necessarily deny these benefits but it feels weird for a scientific paper to hedge its bets like this.
> Moderate coffee consumption is associated with various health benefits, including reduced risks of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer3. In a large cross-sectional study of 468,629 individuals without clinical cardiovascular disease, light-to-moderate coffee consumption was linked to lower rates of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke incidence4. Furthermore, coffee intake is consistently associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in a dose-dependent manner, across multiple human cohorts5,6,7. Meta-analyses have also found that coffee consumers face a lower risk of depression8,9, and one meta-analysis of cohort studies examining cognitive decline, showed that coffee consumption accounted for a 27% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease
It's like they're starting off with "Now don't get me wrong. Coffee will cure cancer, but..."
> New research reveals mechanisms behind coffee’s positive effects on the gut-brain axis
https://www.coffeeandhealth.org/health/media-content/news-al...
Who said anything about big coffee? These guys might be a secret, anti-coffee organisation. /s
Ultimately these industry-funded studies are still gov't funded as well. They are "public-private partnerships" but it's stupid how we don't talk about the fact that usually the majority of the grants come from the gov't. Even when a study is mostly funded by the industry it's relying on utilize existing infrastructure or early-stage research initiated by government funds.
My best explanation is that there are effects, I just suck at self-awareness :)
Then when work picked up, I went back to regular coffee everyday.
I don’t think there’s a hole in my soul though. And caffeine degrades my personality a little bit (to my own judgment).
3-5 is moderate? To me, 3 is already high.
Also, sample size is pretty low and they're all Irish.
To be more precise about my previous message, when I say a cup I mean between 15g and 18g of beans.
Perhaps they even use US coffee cup size, which is 118ml?
Honestly, using an unit of measurement that varies from 118ml to 250ml in a scientific paper brings the whole paper into question.
woa where is half a liter of coffee a "normal" portion?
It seems people think 500ml is more liquid than it is due to how thin cans/bottles are comparatively.
A NORMAL mug of 500ml??? this is insanity to me
Others are mostly describing someone who makes coffee for themself at home or in a break room. That person likely chooses a cup size depending on how much they coffee they want, how frequently they want a refill, etc.
Personally, I don't feel any kind of "drug like" effects from this routine. I wonder about the strength of coffee people are drinking and the effects of drinking throughout the day rather than just the morning.
Anecdotally, during grad school I drank more per serving and throughout the day, and I certainly felt quite different than my current routine.
Like most things, I think people need to find some moderation/balance.
I can have a coffee a bit before bed if I really want. I also used to think I had a "high metabolism", but don't say that anymore since it comes off as kind of bogus.
So it must be some other mechanism that diminished enzyme production. Some of my liver (were those enzymes are produced) values were elevated over the last few years for no good reason, and I suspect the two could be related.
It's a bit annoying, as I'm reacting to trace amounts of caffeine in coffee, tea or chocolate, but I'm more worried about all the other, possibly carcinogenic, environmental toxins my liver won't be able to filter out.
So the answer to your question is: we can't know, from this study.
I'd say 3 is still moderate and really common. 5 is getting on the high'ish side.
Several of us here drink more than that.
For a traditional Italian espresso, about 7g of coffee beans are extracted. For a third-wave double espresso, it's usually 18g or more.
In my opinion, 10x7g is a lot. 2x12g is more than enough for me.
I feel this is more precise than the ml cup measuremnts, but if you wanted to be really precise, you'd have to specify the type of beans used (the caffeine content varies widely) and even the brewing method https://oldchicagocoffee.com/coffee-bean-caffeine-content-by....
And - there is an influence - even in the region the beans are grown. In the link I provided they even go so far as to differentiate as to genetics of the beans.
That's a bit over the recommended limit of 400mg a day the Mayo Clinic, FDA, etc. recommend. Not sure it it qualifies as 'enormous' or not.
If anything, it leans slightly toward beneficial or neutral effects.
What broader science says (not just this paper).
Across many large studies, Coffee is associated with:
* ↓ Lowerisk of Type 2 Diabetes
* ↓ risk of Parkinson’s Disease
* ↓ overall mortality (yes, really)
Downsides (for some people):
* Anxiety / jitters
* Poor sleep
* Increased heart rate
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/nasa-spiders-drugs-experime...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100033433/downloads/20...
Don't ask me why some blogger posted the PDF in 2013, and also don't ask me how English Wikipedia editors determined that a Wordpress blog is a "Reliable Secondary Source". I did locate the original on NASA's own website. Public Domain (USGov).
The poor marijuana spider tried really hard
But they did test both caffeinated and uncaffeinated coffee, and found the same effects in both, indicating that the effect is caused by something in coffee other than the caffeine
I wonder if you could find similar effects with 4g or broccoli sprouts, or garlic, or ginger, or cumin seed, shiitake mushroom, seaweed, soursop leaf, or...
It’s actually kind of crazy to think that a large portion of a country’s population could be “high” on it basically all of the time. And there is a huge industry in place for delivering said drug to as many people as possible by having it available on almost every street corner.
And that most people take a fairly non-chalant attitude to giving this drug to kids through sweet drinks that are primarily marketed to them as well.
The scale of it is kinda mind boggling to me.
Mind the nonsensical rant, I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning…
The original humans adapted to a wide range of diets across the world (one reason why we're such a successful species), but most groups seem to consume mild psychoactives a lot (it's hard not to, so many wild plants have some level of activity) and seek out more powerful ones occasionally and for specific situations.
My next goal is to cut back to one fully caffeinated drink in the moring and then doing decaf the rest of the day.
The ritualistic habit is the hardest thing to break for me. Also the social aspect of “let’s go for coffee” with friends, family, spouse etc…
Then it turned out my rate of getting migraines dropped off considerably. But I love coffee, so I tried decaf. Migraines returned to being more frequent. So that was that.
If I could get it without the side effects, I surely would. Right now I'm drinking a hot cup of delicious roasted barley tea. But it's not the same.
Then at age 34 I started a new job my first shift work job, late evenings, some overnight jobs. I started off with fancy coffee like french vanilla. A year or so later the first Starbucks opened. I was drinking venti quad shot lattes.
Then energy drinks were permitted for sale here (we had a can ban for years). I recall after drinking a Rockstar 750ml for breakfast and the following muscle spasms made me consider I should tone it down.
So I've settled a bit a small coffee in the evening. Sometimes I don't even finish it.
I don’t like that it’s a pill. I tried making my own theacrine drinks, but theacrine is so bitter that I never found one that I liked. I am still haunted by the chicory + theacrine drink I made…
> Moderate coffee consumption is associated with various health benefits, including reduced risks of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer3. In a large cross-sectional study of 468,629 individuals without clinical cardiovascular disease, light-to-moderate coffee consumption was linked to lower rates of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke incidence4. Furthermore, coffee intake is consistently associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in a dose-dependent manner, across multiple human cohorts5,6,7. Meta-analyses have also found that coffee consumers face a lower risk of depression8,9, and one meta-analysis of cohort studies examining cognitive decline, showed that coffee consumption accounted for a 27% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease10.
[1] https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/information-and-support/liv...
— every HN thread about coffee
https://cleanlabelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/CLP-Decaf-C...
Hasn't happened in a long time, probably due to (1) avoiding cheap decaf and (2) the banning of meth-coffee (heh) in the US.
University of Bristol. "Coffee consumption unrelated to alertness: Stimulating effects may be illusion, study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 June 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm>.
Could it be the sugar?
> Coffee also affects the gastrointestinal tract. It increases stomach acidity and stimulates the release of hormones that aid digestion. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee promote the contractility of ileal and colonic smooth muscle, helping prevent constipation
As the two times in my adult life I've tried to make an intended break from coffee, it has ended up with almost unbearable stomach pain caused by constipation.
It's good to know that this is not linked to caffeine as I thought, so I will try un-caffinated coffee instead now because I tend to think that my general "tiredness" comes from actual caffeine.
Same ritual each morning without the unknown dosing of a stimulant drug.
(I'm even seeing the number 97% mentioned a lot online.)
Either way, commercial decaf processes and normal brewing methods will yield something like 5-10mg of caffeine in a "decaf" dose of coffee, which is an order of magnitude less than usual.
I still don't drink coffee, but I started experimenting with paraxanthine and I absolutely love it (paraxanthine is the primary metabolite of caffeine and is also a stimulant). I feel like it gives me most of the benefit of caffeine with very few downsides (no jitters, no crash, exits your system faster).
I drink 3 to 6 Nespresso coffees daily, at various times, including shortly before going to bed. Sometimes I don't drink at all for a few days.
I don't feel any effects related to the number, or whether I drink it or not. Sure, this is subjective but when I compare myself to the stories of the commenters I start to wonder if there is any caffeine at all in what I drink.
I would probably drop coffee it was proven to have negative effects on memory.
you don't remember why, do you?
Better to wait at least couple of hours after waking up.
This sounds interesting. I've never really considered the constituents of coffee other than caffeine and what unique effects they may bring.
I wonder if I would experience behavioral effects if I replaced my coffee intake with caffeinated non-coffee drinks or pills?
One fun fact: we still haven’t figured out why coffee makes us poop. We’ve studied every chemical in there and can’t seem to find a link, but the association is uh… well-known.
That seems to vary wildly between individuals. It doesn't have that effect on me.
Search this page for "mental health incident"
I've also noticed that I have a sort of natural energy in the morning. I think of it as being similar to how a seed has enough energy in itself to sprout and then get sunlight. It's probably so I can make myself eat and whatnot. I don't really need caffeine to "wake up" as much as I need it to stay awake later in the day, and even if I do have a coffee with breakfast, I'll often get tired before the normal day is over.
Falling asleep after a can of energy drink.
This absolutely happens to my father, who uses coffee as a sleep aid but the science is sketchy.
It is documented but I don't know if it is scientifically valid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
I can't find it now but I once read that people who report the "paradoxical reaction" to stimulants have a significantly better outcome from stimulant medications, and both those values seem to have higher heritability than ADHD as a whole, possibly even linked to a single gene.
are you saying chamomile isn't called tea but it's one of the teas without caffeine? if so that's very confused.
camelia sinensis is tea. when i said that other things are casually called tea, i mean that what chamomile tea, for example, ought to be called is a tisane or an herbal infusion. casually, people might call it a tea; some people are so casual about it that they think it actually is tea. but it isn't.
Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee
That's been a big win for me: I feel like I get to enjoy the coffee more, and it eliminated the negative effects for me.
I no longer feel like I suffer when I don't have it. I miss it, the way I miss the sunlight in my office on a cloudy morning, but it's strictly a positive for me when it's around. I only get headaches if I go from 100 to 0, even one day of reduced intake is enough to avoid it for me.
When I'm exhausted and going to bed, I'll go fill the coffee machine, and catch myself thinking "oh boy, it's going to feel so great to wake up at 6am and drink this". Then I shake my head at myself and laugh and how absurd that sounds :D
Coffee is above running hot water in my hierarchy of needs. Seriously. If I were forced to choose between coffee and alcohol for the rest of my life, I'd choose coffee in a heartbeat.
Based on everything I'm reading below, and a "discussion" with Gemini, it's highly probable all of this is related. I know AI isn't a doctor, and confirmation bias and all of that, but even if it's all nonsense - backing off on caffeine or quitting entirely can only help.
So I'm going to star to day, by trying to not have any after 2pm. My regular bedtime is around midnight, so that's 10 hours. We'll see how it goes.
Thanks HN!
So, the coffee stays for now.
You really have to look at the power analysis and the sample size together.
Saying this as a general truth. I am not sure about the power of the method in this papper, i only read the abstract.
If you can predict someone's coffee intake based on testing of their microbiome then you've proven that coffee intake has predictable effects on the microbiome.
The important part isn't predicting coffee use, it's just the proof that there's you can predict and perhaps control in the opposite direction leading to more research.